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Tag Archives: MMO Economy

I think that by this point in time, some fifteen years down the road from the launch of Ultima Online, having a player economy is one of the hallmarks of games I consider to be MMOs, at least when I use the term.

If there is no player to player economy, then the game is something else to my mind. World of Tanks, not an MMO in my book. EverQuest certainly is.

And desire for a player driven economy stems from the deep in the roots of the genre.

In 1993 I was playing TorilMUD, arguably the precursor of EverQuest, which was very much a gear driven game. Despite there being no mechanism at all to handle or encourage a player economy, one spontaneously appeared. The desire to exchange gear for trade or coin, the need to create an economy, was so strong that an unofficial one was started and developed its own rules and customs. And it became popular enough that there were standard prices for certain items. We would sit around in Waterdeep and people would do shout auctions for items, which you would bid on with a direct tell to the seller. And it you were looking for something, you would shout out a “want to buy” or WTB.

The economy become very popular very quickly, to the point that the people running TorilMUD were not quite sure what to do with it. First they tried to contain the amount of spam it caused in town, putting a limit on the number of yells you could do over a given period of time and then by trying to get us to do this in a single room rather than shouting across a whole zone. Eventually, an auction house was implemented, though the devs put the auctioneer in out of the way places, as I think they were still suspicious of the player driven economy.

This suspicion came, in part, from the fact that the player driven economy pointed out flaws in the game. With little to spend the in-game currency on besides items from other players, some people began to amass huge quantities of cash. This, of course, drove up the price of everything in the player economy because the long term players could afford to drop a lot of coins on things they wanted for themselves or alts.

But the whole sinks and faucets and inflation aspect of the currency is another discussion.

Likewise, when EverQuest launched, there were no tools to drive a player economy. It formed around the Commonlands tunnel where people would go to buy and sell, very much in the model of TorilMUD. This popped up again for a bit on the progression servers, at least until the bazaar showed up.

Nostalgia at the tunnel

I was thinking about all of this and trying to fit MMO player economies into a two dimensional system for comparison.

What I came up with was how much of a requirement the player economy was to play the game and how much friction there was to engaging in the player economy.

The first seems pretty reasonable to gauge. Can you play the game, or can you get very far in the game, without engaging in the player economy. For example, in EVE Online, you have to use the player economy to play the game. You could, I suppose, try to avoid it. In fact, it might be an interesting experiment to see what you could do without it. But I imagine that it would be a long, slow grind to completely avoid the market and it would limit what you could accomplish.

Most other MMOs make the player economy somewhat optional, and have moved more in that direction over time. The combination of quest rewards and game difficulty have moved in the direction of keeping players independent of the player economy.

Friction, on the other hand, encompasses a whole range of things, such as:

How easy is it to access the market?

How easy is it to buy and take delivery?

How good is the UI?

How high are the fees/taxes on transactions?

How stable is pricing?

Do enough people use the economy to make it viable?

And it is with this that you start to get all over the map. For example, Guild Wars 2 and EVE Online are oddly similar in how easy it is to view the market. You can bring it up in the UI wherever you are. On the other hand, while GW2 shows you everything on the market in the game, EVE limits you to your current region.

Anyway, in order to compare these, I made a little graph and put down where I thought certain games might sit on those two continuum. This is what I ended up with.

Click to make readable

The X axis is friction, and the mixed bag of items that represents. The Y axis is how much of a requirement it is to engage in the player driven economy. For a few games I made entries for past states of the game and how they seem currently.

EVE Online is, of course, the game furthest down the required end of the spectrum. I also put it midway along the high end of the friction scale. On the one hand the market is chopped up by regions, there is no delivery so you have to go get the item from the station in which it was listed, this leads to interesting price differentials based on convenience, there is a double tax/fee system, and then there is the whole contracts economy to confuse the issue. And pity the poor capsuleer in the middle of nowhere in need of something.

Mitigating that friction is that if you go to the right system, usually Jita, you can find what you want to buy, and there are so many buyers and sellers competing that there is price stability.

At the other end of things is Guild Wars 2, where you can list to sell anywhere and just have to find the right NPC to pick up items you have purchased and proceeds from sales. The friction is so low that low that lots of people engage in the economy, so commodities for crafting and the like are readily available at reasonable prices. How much a player is really required to participate is a wild guess on my part. Gear provided by your personal quest line seemed good if you kept up, but I have no idea if that carries on through the game.

In the middle, well, a few other games. I ranked LOTRO‘s friction higher than most because of the low participation and the annoying locations and mediocre UI of the auctioneers. On the other hand, you don’t really need it, and doubly so since Turbine started selling very good armor in the cash shop.

EverQuest II was high friction at launch in some ways… you had to be online to sell, sales were restricted to the storage space of your home (which you had to have to sell), and fees pushed players to go visit players directly in their homes. And, if you were crafting at the time, there was the interdependence of the crafting skills that required you to use the market or use up your four character slots to make crafting alts. On the other hand, when you buy something on the broker in EQII, it appears right in your inventory. A lot of that got smoothed out over time, but dependence on the broker went with a lot of that.

EverQuest started at high friction, you had to be online and see the right person on the auction channel selling something you wanted. Later the Bazaar came and you could get a listing, but sellers had to be online, in the Bazaar, and you had to go find them. Finally, things got to offline selling in the more recent expansions, though I think you still have to show up at the Bazaar.

I ranked TorilMUD even higher on friction, if only because the player base was so much smaller. When your player population is a few hundred, and only 256 can be on at a time, your buying and selling options are pretty limited.

And in the middle there is World of Warcraft, which used to have a segmented market, but which has since been unified. The UI for it has gotten better over time, and the addons for playing the auction house have grown more sophisticated, but the need for the auction house has diminished over time as quest rewards in the form of gear have become more regular and standardized through the leveling process.

So there is my chart. It is pretty much a gut-level, unsubstantiated work at this point. Where do you think I am right and where am I clearly wrong? And where would other games fit on the chart?

And, of course, where do you think MMOs should sit on that chart? What would be ideal, if anything?

Another one of those posts that starts with “back in the day…” and which recounts how things used to be during the stone age of online gaming. Writing about it is not necessarily advocating for its return, but it certainly made things different. Anyway, on to it…

Back in the day, back in TorilMUD, there were things that were very different than we see them now in modern MMORPGs, and there were things that were very much the same.

It was all text, all the time back then

One thing that was the same was money.

Everybody needed it, the economy needed it, but nobody started out with any and the only real way to get any was to kill NPCs that spawned in the world for their loot.

There were also quests. But quests were not very common, annoying to find, and could be frustratingly difficult to complete. I have gone into the way questing used to be back in the day. There was nobody standing around waiting to tell you to kill ten rats. And the end result was more often an item than any money.

So that left murdering the residents of the world and looting their still warm corpses as the only real money making enterprise.

Wholesale slaughter would get you some coins. But for the most part that was a pretty slow way to earn money, at least at lower levels. Later, in a leveling group in place like the pirate ship, a good group could end up with a nice pile of cash.

But you, new adventurer, won’t be doing that or zones or anything of the sort for a long while.

And that went double for elves and half elves who started on the Island of Evermeet, in the elvish city of Leuthilspar and were stuck there for the first 20 levels of their career. I will focus on the plight of the elves, since that is what I am most familiar with.

So to supplement the tiny trickle of coins, you would have to also grab whatever else your victims were carrying. Swords, bits and pieces or armor and clothing, random items of junk, whatever you could pry from their cold, dead fingers. You would collect all of this to sell to one of the many vendors in Abeir-Toril.

As a young citizen of Leuthilspar, you would head out to Kobold Village or the Faerie Forest in search of adventure, experience, and loot. At least, once you figured out how to get there. Eventually, if you were successful… by which I generally mean that you did not die and have to go find your corpse in the dark… you would have a pile of coins and some items to vendor.

In Kobold Village there was a couple of vendors, but as your became more seasoned you began to notice that those vendors paid very little for your items. That was the way of the world. The buy and sell prices from vendors were influence by your race, your class, your charisma stat, and the general level of wickedness of the person who created the zone.

The young elvish adventurer could make much more money, multiples of what the stingy vendors out in the world were offering, if said adventurer just dragged all of that loot back to a vendor in Leuthilspar.

The key was, which vendor.

Leuthilspar Locations (click to embiggen)

The good part was that all the vendors were pretty close to the square at city center and near to the bank.

The down side was that the vendors were all pretty picky about what they would buy. Your options were:

1 – Talidnal’s Goods and Supply Shop – Sold random supplies like rations and small bags, would buy miscellaneous items of the same sort. You had to sell the red feather from the traveling faerie here.

2 – The Weapon Shop of Leuthilspar – Bought and sold weapons and only weapons. Notable for being one of the vendors with special responses. Would point out in all caps that this was weapon shop if you tried to sell something else and would claim that they could buy items flagged “no value” because they just bought a Doombringer earlier.

3 – The Scribe Shop of Leuthilspar – Sold scroll, including the scroll of identify. These cost 2 platinum coins, which was more than any new player could afford, but which was the only way to see the full stats and information on any given item. Except, of course, if the item was flagged as “no identify,” in which case you just wasted 2 plat.

4 – Silyonlanster’s Fine Gems and Jewels – Sold some gems that had no purpose I ever found, and would buy any gems you happened to have.

5 – Norlan’s Pet Shop – Bought nothing as far as I could tell, but would sell you a very expensive pet that would fight for you and which would be gone forever if it died… or if you logged off. A lot of us bought one of these exactly once.

6 – The Armorer of Leuthilspar – Sold some very heavy bronze armor and would buy anything flagged as armor, which did not include leather armor from Kobold Village or the Cloak of Forest Shadows.

7 – The Leviathan Shipwright – Sold rafts and canoes for crossing water. You just had to have one in your inventory (but not in a container) for them to work. Would buy them back at a deep discount.

8 – The Green Griffon Pub – Sold alcoholic beverages. Never bought anything I had to sell.

9 – Tilanthra’s Shop of Alchemy – Bought and sold potions.

10 – The Magic Shop of Leuthilspar – Sold a number of scrolls and wands, despite there already being a scroll shop. Would only buy wands and the like. This is where you would sell that Wand of Thunderous Rage that was in the garbage heap and which never worked for me over the last 15 years.

11 – Morlanthrtilan’s Fine Clothier – Had nothing for sale as I recall, but would buy that leather armor from Kobold Village that the armor shop turned its nose up at.

12 – The Blue Dragon Inn and Restaurant – Sold oddly specific and very expensive food at various times and would buy, for reasons I could never determine, arrows and quarrels.

13 – Qulazoral’s Barrels and More – Sold you a skin or a barrel of water after your first issued water skin evaporated after you emptied it (I think they finally fixed that) but before you finally got a flagon from Bandor. Would buy liquid containers, if you ever found one.

There were some other vendors in town. Each guild had a vendor that might give you a few more coins for specific items. But in general, it was vendor row on main street that handled your needs. You just needed to run around a lot until you figured out who bought what. It helped that what vendors purchased ended up in their inventory for sale again, a feature I miss, and which was last seen in EverQuest as I recall.

And even then you would end up with a few items that no vendor would purchase, but which were not flagged “no value.” There were a few items I would have to travel to Mithril Hall, way up in the north beyond Neverwinter, in order to vendor. I think the dead rat was on that list.

Still, in some ways, the elves did not have it so bad. The vendors gave decent prices and were all centrally located. This was not necessarily the case in Waterdeep or Baldurs gate, and good luck selling things way down in Calimport.

And vendors in Leuthilspar never closed. Elves don’t need sleep. In other towns vendors would often close for some or all of the night cycle of a given day. The time translation was one real world minute for one game hour, so you might end up sitting in a shop for 6 or 8 or 12 minutes waiting for the vendor to open up again.

And with all of that, you still ran the risk of selling something of value to other players… something you could sell or trade… to a vendor without knowing. As I mentioned above, you needed a scroll of identify to see what an item did. There were no stats on demand and equipment was not color coded by the now standard formula (gray, white, green, blue, purple) to indicate relative worth. Of course, once you sold the item to a vendor, it cost you a lot more to buy it back. It seemed that vendors were in the business of making money… or at least acting like they were there to make money as opposed to just being a place to dump your crap.

Today though, we can see it all. Stats show up when we hover the cursor over and item, and it will even show what we have equipped in the relevant slot so we can instantly compare. Items names are color coded, as noted above. And not only will vendors buy just about anything you have (and sell it back to you at the same price if sold something by mistake) but we are at the point in games like Rift where there is a button that will automatically sell all of your “trash” grade loot to the vendor with a single press.

As I said at the top, I am not exactly hankering to go back to the way vendors used to be. But it is interesting to see how much has changed, and one wonders if it was all for the better.

The team at CCP dove fully into the in-game currency selling market with EVE Online a while back with their 30 day CONCORD Pilot License Extension program, or PLEX.

For $35 you can buy two PLEX which you can then sell to people in-game for somewhere between 250 and 400 million ISK. (Planning and patience can be worth 150 million ISK!) You get your ISK, another player gets 30 more days of play time without laying out any cash, everybody is happy.

But what I really like about this is that it gives people a baseline value for ISK and things bought and sold with ISK.

A friend dropped me a note about the game. He is starting off and while he likes the game, he is more interested in *pew* *pew* and less interested in the sometimes grindy acquisition of ISK. (I’ll admit, mining is an acquired taste, and all the more so when mineral prices are down.)

He was wondering about buying ISK. He had looked around and found some 3rd party seller looking to unload ISK at a rate of $70 per billion. There is the wonder of EVE again, where 10,000 ISK and 1,000,000,000 can both be meaningful and meaningless in the right context.

Anyway, I pointed out that if you get caught buying from such a source, CCP will take it away from you. That and a warning seems to be the standard for a first offense.

But I also did the math.

Even as a quick, low end sale, $35 buys you two PLEX which will get you 500 million ISK, so $70 would get you a billion and it would be risk free. Potentially though, played right, that $35 gets you pretty close to the billion mark. So the best case scenario would be paying the same price for a greatly increased risk.

That pretty much cleared up the situation for him on that front.

Then later I was IM’ing with another friend who mentioned that a corp mate sold one of his characters. This is also legal in EVE Online. You can sell a character for ISK. You cannot sell your account however, nor can you sell your character for real world currency under the rules of the game. But transferring a character for ISK is perfectly acceptable and CCP has a process that protects both buyer and seller.

Anyway, the selling price for the character in question was 8 billion ISK, which seems like a lot. Just a billion of anything is a lot to me.

But then I did the calculation. 8 billion ISK buys you 26 months of game play, using the safe middle ground number of 300 million ISK per PLEX. 26 months of play is, at most, if you pay by the month, around $390. And if you pay by the quarter like I do, it is down closer to $340. That isn’t enough for me to want to sell either of my long term characters, assuming that I could even get that much money for any of them.

Not that you can actually cash out, because you end up with ISK or game time, but it gives you a sense of the monetary value of that transaction or really any transaction in the game, including making 3rd party ISK sellers look a bit silly at time. You may view that as a good thing or a bad thing, a real measurement you can bring home or a breaking of immersion, but there it is.

Now the whole PLEX thing works in EVE Online with its single server (but regional markets and no instant delivery) and economy where everything can be bought for ISK, but where ISK is not really a measure of success.

But then you wonder, what other games could support something similar to PLEX?

Which economies are robust enough to support that sort of thing? You’d think with the constant talk about illicit gold buying, (and how it will never go away) that there would be some games with enough currency flow to be able to practically implement something like PLEX.

I am closing down most of the first part of my production experiment. I have managed to go in and prove that money can be made with some basic blueprints in EVE Online. I ended up producing the following items:

Flameburst MissileProduction Cost Per Unit 6.33 ISK
Average Sale Price 8.84 ISK
Comment: The first item I decided to produce. Because I use a lot of these missiles, it made sense. While I ended up with a net profit after all costs, including materials, I did face a lot of price pressure in some systems, so I did not exactly get rich making these missiles.

Sabertooth MissileProduction Cost Per Unit 10.91 ISK
Average Sale Price 17.89 ISK
Comment: A slow seller, but there was also not much competition, so I made back my investment over the course of my run.

Widowmaker MissileProduction Cost Per Unit 29.10 ISK
Average Sale Price 31.01 ISK
Comment: Chosen more for the fact that I couldn’t find any close by one night when I needed some heavy missiles. Depending on what system I was selling in, I either faced a huge amount of price pressure or I was able to charge freely. I did not make my money back on this blueprint directly, but that does not take into account the fact that I fired a good chunk of the missiles I made out of my own launchers.

Antimatter Charge SProduction Cost Per Unit 10.45 ISK
Average Sale Price 12.10 ISK
Comment: I picked this up on the suggestion of Debes and it turned out to be a good deal. I made my money back and, because I have gone all missiles with my Drake, I did not even fire off any of the inventory. Money made back on my investment.

Iron Charge SProduction Cost Per Unit 8.02 ISK
Average Sale Price 5.17 ISK
Comment: Simply the worst thing I produced. I bought the blueprint way back in January when I was starting to think about production. I found the blueprint when I was moving stuff to our corp HQ and decided to produce a run. A full run of 150K charges. I had the materials handy, but I should have checked the market first. The price point is horrible. And even priced way below costs I have only sold 1/3 of the lot. Anybody want some iron charges, cheap?

Expanded Cargohold IProduction Cost Per Unit 959.92 ISK
Average Sale Price 4824.80 ISK
Comment: The best item I chose to produce. I don’t sell huge lots of these, like I do with missiles or hybrid charges, but they sell consistently and at a decent margin. I will continue to produce these as time goes on.

But why would I stop producing any of these (except for the iron charges) you might ask.

I finally woke up to why the price competition was so fierce and why some people seemed to be selling below the cost of producing these items.

The thing with EVE is that it does have some of the same problems that other MMOs face. One of those problems is often misunderstood mudflation. The term implies that all prices rise as a MUD or MMO ages. But, in reality, some items fall in price because they become too commonplace. And one reason they become common because easy mobs drop them all the time.

And what do easy mobs… say NPC pirates… drop all the time in EVE Online?

Light missiles, small hybrid charges, and frigate modules.

So I found that I could buy things like Flameburst missiles, antimatter charges, and even Widowmaker missiles, for as much as 35-65% less than the cost of production.

Why spend 29 ISK making a Widowmaker missile when you can put out a buy order and pick them up for 15 ISK?

So my economic empire has shifted priorities. It will be arbitrage rather than production for most things now. I have buy orders out now for my area to purchase millions of missiles and charges at prices well below my cost to produce, even with material effeciency research. And the missiles and charges are coming in, so I have begun replenishing my sales channel with these lower cost items.

Still, some things are better to make.

Expanded Cargoholds, for example, do not drop very often and have buy orders all over for pretty close to the cost of production. So I am better off making those, as they sell for a large mark-up and move at a steady rate.

So for my next round of production, I am looking for things that are in demand that do not drop, or do not drop very often, from NPCs. Mining crystals might be something to look at. And rigs, though the parts are hard to come by. And then there is always blueprint copying and invention to look into.

Yes, I know. It is all virtual, entries in a database. It doesn’t “go” anywhere, it just ceases to be.

Once upon a time, years back, vendor trash used to stick around. It still does today, if you know where to look.

Back in the heyday of Diku MUDs, the vendors in my own favorite derivative, Toril, used to allow you to list out and buy all of the stuff that people sold to them.

This was a tradition carried forward into EverQuest, and one I miss.

There were always lots of interesting things for sale at a popular vendor. Often very useful things. I still always look at what the vendors have in stock when I go back to EQ.

Of course, with just a few low level characters in EQ these days, my tastes are pretty modest.

Still there are things of use, things of value, things for trade skills, and things that are just downright odd in those vendor inventories.

But perhaps this points to something else about EQ, that even vendor trash had some use. There were spells that required those beetle eyes. I could always sharpen those rusted weapons to work on my trade skills. And I always operate under the theory that bad equipment in an slot is better than no equipment at all.

So I pick through the vendor trash in EQ and have a good time doing it.

But I end up wondering why I cannot buy the items other people sold to vendors in other games.

Would it kill the economies of these other worlds? Would the market go flat in EverQuest II if I could purchase from the vendor in the trade skill instance all of the items people made just to level up their skills? Or does the fact that people grind up trade skill levels just to sell most of the stuff to an NPC point out some more fundamental flaw in the economy?

And how about grey drops in World of Warcraft or the general crap drops in other games? Why can’t anything be done with them?

Do these games need inventory filling items that are only there to be sold for minor amounts of cash and disappear?

I think I am going down the opposite road from the “I want to loot what the mob is shown wearing/wielding” crowd.

I don’t really want to loot anything that does not have some value in the game. And I don’t just mean value to me at that very moment. Value to somebody besides an NPC vendor would be fine. Just say “no” to vendor trash.

Of course, at the far end of the vendor trash spectrum is EVE Online. I like the fact that there isn’t a convenient NPC vendor around every corner to buy the crap drops from some asteroid belt rat.

And not only that, but everything has some value. Even if nobody wants to buy it on the market, you can always refine it down to some minerals. The mineral market is quite active.

So, in a way, EVE Online is the ultimate anti-vendor trash game. Almost nothing goes into the NPC vendor black hole. Everything has some viability, in some fashion, in the vast economy of EVE.

But when you have a game that puts out a .pdf quarterly economic report with charts and graphs, I suppose that is to be expected.

With mining for fun and profit, as opposed to mining to get materials for manufacture, the key is to get the most money for your time on the mining laser.

How to make sure you are getting the most cash for your mining efforts is not as obvious as you might think. You have to pay attention to all of the details.

When I first saw the surface details, I thought I knew the right answer.

In high security areas (0.5 and above) you get four flavors of asteroids. Each of those four flavors can be refined in lots of 333 units of ore. Each lot of 333 yields a fixed amount of minerals. The four flavors and their yields are:

These prices are what I have been able to sell minerals for in a reasonable amount of time on the market.

It seems like and easy choice to go mine plagioclase. So that is what I have been doing since I started my mining, hitting the plagioclase asteroids.

And it turns out that, at those prices, it is the right item to mine for maximum value, but not by as much as I thought.

Each of the ore types take up a different amount of space. The rate at which mining lasers and strip miners mine is based on the capacity they can hold, which is an odd mechanic to me. Since the various types of ore come in different sizes, you end up mining them at different rates.

So, for example, a strip miner on my ship, which fills its 540 cubic meter capacity every 3 minutes, harvests, with my current skills and equipment, the following amount of ore with each three minute mining cycle:

Those are gross value amounts, and do not take into consideration that I lose 1% of the minerals as a processing fee and that the broker and tax collector each dun me another 0.6% for the market transaction.

So plagioclase is still the most lucrative ore for me at the moment. I guessed right for once. A shift down in the price of Mexallon, or a continuation of the rise in Tritanium, could change the most lucrative asteroid to common Veldspar pretty quickly.

Veldspar, because of the surge in the price of Tritanium (because of speculation and stockpiling for new ships, as noted at the end of the EVE Economic Blog #2) is being mined quite actively in asteroid belts that I pass through. I have seen several belts cleared of Veldspar, but still full of Plagioclase.

Of course, my real dream now is to mine some Kernite, a low security are asteroid. As I calculate it, a full load of Kernite ore should be worth 4,854,325 ISK before fees and taxes. Not bad for the 20 minutes it takes my Hulk to mine enough for a full load.

All of the information about ore, its size, and what it yields, is in the Complete Miner’s Guide that I have linked in the past, though the charts with the details are scattered throughout the guide. I recommend you take a look at the guide if you plan to start mining.